Main Stage Track

Templates, trainings, threats: I’ve tried everything to get content from clients and colleagues sooner—and mobile hasn’t made things easier. Instead of planning pages, now we’re asking stakeholders to prioritize and manage a million bits of modular content. So how do we keep our subject-matter experts from feeling overwhelmed, prevent carousel-obsessed executives from endless homepage arguments, and get the content we need to make design and development decisions?
The answer is in using content strategy as a means to orchestrate, not dictate. Orchestra conductors don’t control all the instruments or the people playing them. Instead, they:
1. Unify performers: Learn how to get your ensemble cast of content producers rallied around shared priorities and goals from the start—and see how understanding their politics and processes can improve every aspect of the project, not just content.
2. Listen and adjust: Having a great ear will help you hear problems sooner, so you can better allocate time and resources to the areas that will most shape the content’s overall quality.
3: Keep the tempo: It’s hard to focus on the notes in front of you and think about where the song is heading. Learn to help your players stay focused on the details, while showing them how their part helps the whole piece come together.
Best of all, you don’t have to be a content expert to be your project’s conductor. In this talk, you’ll hear what you can do—yes, you—to bring harmony to the content process.

This session will give you a brief overview of user-centered design such that it allows for the introduction of practical versions of more rigorous UX methods. Examples include nano usability testing, SUS testing, first click tests and other bite-sized methods that can be rapidly introduced and used to good measure. How do we suddenly add usability testing to our process? Nano testing helps you quickly do just that, and produce valid useful results that influence your design work. This approach helps designers ease these methods into their workflow.

There will always be different ways of working when it comes to designers and developers. But it’s not about changing what people work with, it’s about working with people. Regardless of what file they give you. In this keynote, you’ll learn how brand new technologies are enabling designers to use the apps they want (like Photoshop) and how developers can get the content they need (graphics, CSS, etc.). Probably the best 20 minutes you’ll spend all day. (Aside from the wise decision to get coffee this morning.)

The web has evolved so quickly that the tools we use to create it haven't had time to catch up. We've designed in the browser; we've designed in Photoshop; but neither satisfies the needs of modern web designers. However, a revolution is rising and new tools are reimagining our craft. Questions as to the need for front end development are racing through the web. Join us for a romp through web design’s past, an examination of its present and a look into its unexpected future.

@mrjoe will take you on a journey to find the holy grail we are all looking for. The perfect design. What exactly is the perfect design? Well, that's what you will find out in the session. We'll look at the three aspects that define the perfect design and three approaches from psychology to address each aspect.
We'll look at a practical strategy that uses psychology to produce the ideal design for those tricky user experience design problems we face everyday.

1:00pm

Lunch

2:00pm

Designing From the Ground Up: Approaching, Prioritizing and Executing Design

As designers we generally cannot wait to throw ourselves headfirst into projects, to start sketching, thinking about colours, and imagining user flows. It’s important to put on the breaks and step back from the project to address the problems you’ll be solving. At the end of the day, great design is solving problems elegantly and simply. How will you work with your teams to make your products and/or services stand out and be successful? We’ll look at ways to get the right answers from your clients and how to maximise your results by focusing on simple solutions that lead to success. You’ll leave with new ways to think about your projects and new techniques for creating compelling brand stories, engaging content, and user experiences that make your customers your biggest fans.

Gone are the days of being stuck with nothing but hard-cut transitions on the web! The future of web design includes sophisticated animations in its interactions, and it’s up to us as designers to make them both meaningful and awesome.
In this session we’ll cover where animation can add important detail and inform UX; how to get animation ideas out of your head; and techniques for prototyping animations as part of our design process. Just like typography, colour and others, animation is an element of design that can speak volumes in our work. Considering it early in the design process means we’ll be designing the best kind of animations. The kind that can take our work beyond good, to great!

Using a living pattern library and rapid prototyping built with Sass, Compass and Middleman can have a great impact on increasing communication and collaboration between designers and developers. In this session we will review a case study from an enterprise-level development group traditionally staffed with 60+ developers and no designers and how they were able to implement a pattern library and rapid prototyping framework into their design and development process.
We'll discuss recognizing patterns, modular pattern creation with Sass/Compass/Slim/JavaScript, how patterns can be combined to be used during rapid prototyping
developing a consistent language that can be used between designers and developers and collaboration exercises for designers and developers to create a consistent feedback loop.

Rising Stars Track

Do you really need all of that Wordpress overhead? Could you improve your site load time, security, and maintainability while simplifying your development workflow and giving yourself more design control? Barry will introduce you to the benefits of using Jekyll, a static site generator that's great for creating blogs, portfolio sites and simple client sites. He’ll walk through creating a site using Jekyll and hosting it on Github Pages, highlighting common issues that people run into during setup and how to overcome them to create better experiences for you and your clients.

In this session Gian Wild will be speaking about how to make your mobile sites accessible. WCAG2 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0) was written before mobile devices were ubiquitous and, while there is an increased awareness of accessibility on desktop sites, mobile accessibility presents a whole new challenge. There are accessibility issues unique to the mobile format, such as lack of keyboard, lack of mouse hover and reduced screen size. Gian will discuss the most common problems and how you can avoid them to create great experiences for everyone.

As designers, we've only just scratched the surface of building effective mobile e-commerce sites. So why look even further into the future? New devices and device types are already cresting the horizon. Android watches, Google Glass, and SmartTVs are here or just around the corner. How will these different contexts affect interaction, layout, and user expectations?
This talk will explore lessons learned from years of building enterprise mobile e-commerce sites. We'll walk through some theories behind designing interfaces for these devices. We'll explore current future-forward UIs and see who's doing it well and who's not. By the end of this talk, Kyle will have painted a detailed picture of the future of e-commerce so you'll feel prepared for the future. It's coming sooner than you think.

Justin is a web designer like you, so he can tell you we all have a serious flaw: we're energy inefficient. The overspending of electricity in our designs has far-reaching consequences, has persisted undetected for a long time, and permeates almost every pixel on the Web.
In general, people think about their energy consumption only nine minutes per year, so it's not surprising that you or I have been big energy spenders when it comes to building the Web. Storing data, sending information, and displaying pixels on screens—all of these things cost a surprising amount of electricity, especially considering the global energy implications of running the Internet. Luckily, this also means that the possibility of energy savings in our industry is significant, and there are some simple things that you and I can do to stop being inefficient. In this talk, I’lll show you just how much energy your sites and apps are using and offer practical, easy tips to help you earn your next rank: energy-efficient web designer!

The most essential elements of a brand are rarely listed in the brand guide. In order to accurately represent a brand online we must go a step deeper than pantone 375c or Futura Light with a kerning of -45. Getting to the core of the brands we represent is not an easy task, Dave will use real world examples to share the process of effectively telling brand stories that turn customers into brand ambassadors. By discussing the the process from brand construction to site launch we will help you convey your clients brand and 'create great experiences’.